


A Better World

by weakinteraction



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/M, Time Travel Fix-It, guest appearances from various other 24th-century Trek characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-17 07:44:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17556206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Alynna Nechayev does not give up easily, in any timeline.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



_Rakal, Cardassian-Dominion space, 2375_

Ro pushed the cleaning trolley across the shuttlebay, keeping her eyes down but glancing all around her constantly in case any guards decided to pay attention to her.

Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she took deep breaths to keep herself under control. This was by far the riskiest operation her cell had ever attempted.

Her part was relatively simple, though: she was the getaway driver. Ro knew that she was the best pilot the Resistance had -- certainly the only one who had trained at Starfleet Academy -- but she wasn't going to get the chance to demonstrate her skills if she didn't secure a vehicle.

"You there!" came a Cardassian voice. "Halt!" Ro looked up, into the barrel of a disruptor. "This is a restricted area. Bajoran scum like you aren't allowed."

"I'm sorry," Ro said, tucking her hair behind her ear -- the absence of her earring was like a wound, albeit a necessary part of the disguise. "I'm new here, I didn't realise."

"Well, now you do," the Cardassian said, gesturing with the disruptor. "Leave now."

Ro glanced around her; he seemed to be the only guard in the shuttlebay, and if everything was going according to plan Ivat should be here any moment. It was worth the risk. She pushed the trolley into him, hard, then grabbed hold of the stock of the disruptor and used it to twist his arm behind his back. The Cardassian was far larger than she was, but too complacent, had fallen for the act that she was a broken, browbeaten slave. She wrestled the weapon from his hand; he struggled free of her grasp, but by the time he was charging her she had turned the disruptor round and was firing. The guard evaporated in a momentary cloud of orange flame, the moment of agony caught on his face before it disappeared too short for him to have begun screaming.

Ro looked down at the weapon. She hadn't had time to adjust the setting, she told herself. It was the Cardassians' own problem if they kept everything on maximum all the time.

She retrieved the trolley and took it quickly to the only vehicle in the bay with warp capability, a small patrol craft. She had just a few minutes before the guard missed his next check-in, less time even than that if anyone was monitoring the feed from the security cameras. As she reached the shuttle's entrance hatch, she reached into the trolley and pulled out not cleaning equipment but the isolinear rod that Fera had programmed. She forced open the palmprint device that controlled access to the shuttle and inserted it. Now all she could do was wait as Fera's ferociously complex adaptive code go to work; she turned and scanned the entrances to the shuttlebay, holding the disruptor in front of her, ready to fire at any moment.

There was a soft click, followed by the whirring noise of the shuttle door opening. Ro backed inside, reaching out quickly to retrieve the rod as she did so.

The vessel's systems were waking up all around her, lights and screens turning on, even the heating beginning to activate. She knelt down under the cockpit console to insert the rod again, hoping that it would overcome the security measures before they recognised her as unauthorised.

There was a shout outside. Ro rushed to the hatch, disruptor at the ready.

Three guards were running towards her; she fired, then took cover behind the bulkhead as their shots fizzed past her, hitting the ceiling.

Ro considered her options: she could close the hatch, but if she did that it would slow things down when Ivat arrived. For a moment she entertained the fantasy of getting the craft in the air and trying to turn it round to fire on them, but even her piloting skills weren't up to manoeuvring in such confined conditions, and that would alert main control to shut down access to the bay.

She was just going to have to fight it out.

She leaned round the corner and fired off two shots in quick succession, not even checking to see if they reached their targets before hiding again.

They had been much closer than she had anticipated when she fired; they would be inside the shuttle any moment. She crouched against the bulkhead, aiming up, ready to fire as soon as they did.

Two Cardassians entered; she must have caught one of them as she fired blindly. She fired again and the Cardassian, still turning towards her, disappeared.

The final Cardassian had her disruptor drawn, though. She smiled thinly as she levelled it at Ro.

Ro fired again, but her disruptor refused to fire, making the whining noise that indicated it was preventing itself from overheating. She had no idea how to override the safeties.

The Cardassian's smile grew wider. Ro was getting ready to charge her when suddenly she was knocked flat to the floor, leapt on by a familiar figure.

Ro joined Ivat in pinning the Cardassian down. "Where the hell have you been?" Ro said, as she struggled underneath them.

"There were ... complications," Ivat said.

"Did you get it?"

Ivat nodded to his own cleaning trolley, which was outside next to Ro's.

Ro nodded and ran out again. More Cardassians were coming, and she fired her disruptor, working again now, indiscriminately to try to keep them at bay. She reached into Ivat's trolley and found a large case. Grabbing it, she ran back to the patrol craft.

The Cardassian woman was lying still on the floor, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. Ro put down the case and joined Ivat in pushing her out of the hatch.

Ro crossed straight to the console. "We're still locked out of main navigation!" she shouted.

"Ah," Ivat said. He picked up the disruptor that the Cardassian had dropped when he had tackled her, and crossed to the hatch. Ro heard the sound of him firing over and over as her hands flew over the controls, trying to see which systems Fera's code had succeeded in unlocking.

 _Ah ha!_ Thruster control was working.

"Get back from the hatch!" she yelled.

Ivat scrambled back as she closed the hatch and activated forward thrusters. The craft skittered along the floor of the bay, the thrusters throwing out hot plasma behind them. Ro imagined the pursuing Cardassians retreating in response as she engaged the thrusters underneath the craft to begin hovering.

"Are you insane?" Ivat said.

"Probably," Ro said. She scanned the controls again. Weapons were online. She fired ahead of her at the shuttlebay doors. There was no point trying to bypass the security now; the whole base must have been aware of their presence by now. "How do you feel about blasting our way out of here?"

"You're _definitely_ insane," Ivat said, as he sat in the co-pilot's chair.

Ro fired the forward disruptor cannons and the heavy bulkheads of the shuttlebay blasted open in front of them. Sunlight suddenly flooded the scene, forcing Ro to squint.

They weren't going to get far on thruster power, though. Ro could already see the base's defensive turrets swivelling around to target them.

She was programming a nearly futile thruster-only evasive pattern when main navigation finally unlocked. "This is going to be bumpy!" she shouted to Ivat as she went straight to full impulse power.

They streaked out of the thin atmosphere, the bolts from the turrets passing harmlessly underneath them.

Ivat was studying the tactical display. "The Galor-class in orbit is vectoring towards us."

"Only to be expected," Ro said. She swung the craft around.

"You're taking us _towards_ them," Ivat said.

"This little thing is mostly for in-system work," Ro said. "It can only do Warp 5."

"So we need to get away _now_ ," Ivat said.

"And have them follow our warp signature all the way back to the base? I don't think so."

"What exactly do you intend to do?"

"Disable their main sensor arrays so they can't," Ro said.

"Insane," Ivat said again, shaking his head.

Ro flew towards the warship as it turned towards them, constantly jinking and weaving to evade the fire that began to rain down from it. Then she straightened up, firing once, twice, three times at the same spot in the shields, opening a hole just in time for her to fly through it.

The Cardassians stopped firing, unable to get a lock on an object so close to them. Ro strafed down the flank of the warship, disabling the starboard sensors, before looping round the aft section and doing the same to the port side.

"Now comes the really difficult bit," Ro said. She fired again to re-open the hole in the shields and flew back out, but this put her directly in front of the warship's main forward cannon. She dived back down toward the planet, the warship in hot pursuit.

But it couldn't follow her into air. She skimmed across the top of the planet's atmosphere like a stone thrown across water, engaging the warp drive as soon as she pulled out again.

She leaned back in her seat as streaking rainbow stars flew past them.

Ivat looked at her with an expression of utter disbelief.

"Oh come on," she said. "You knew I was good." He said nothing. "You're not even going to congratulate me a little bit?"

Ivat continued to look impassive. Ro began to wonder: what if he suspected her? The whole thing was so improbable might have been an elaborate ruse, their escape allowed deliberately.

"Fine," she said, reaching into her pocket for the small hyposampler. She passed it to him.

"What do you want me to do with this?"

Ro unrolled her sleeve and held out her forearm to him. "Take my blood," she said. "Prove to yourself that I'm not a Changeling." A standard precaution whenever members of the Resistance met up, and they _had_ been separated during the mission. If they hadn't been so busy escaping, they should have done it already.

Ivat looked unwilling, but pressed the hypo to her skin. Ro winced as it took the sample.

"See?" she said. "Now, your turn."

"Ah," Ivat said.

"Ah?"

"I see that there's no point maintaining the deception any longer," he said.

"What do you--" But the question died in Ro's mouth, as Ivat's features suddenly rippled, his clothes seemed to dissolve, and his whole form shimmer. A moment later, a new face was staring at her. A face that had been familiar to Bajorans even before Emissary Dukat's discovery of the wormhole. Once Constable Odo of Terok Nor, now Intendant Odo of the entire Bajoran system.

" _You_ ," Ro said. She reached for the disruptor, but the Changeling lashed out a tentacle of his still-amorphous arm and grabbed it away. "I won't take you to the Resistance base. These co-ordinates are just a waypoint. I wanted to throw the Cardassians off the trail." A desperate lie.

"There's no need to be alarmed," the Changeling said. "Believe it or not, I want to help you."

"You're right," Ro said. "I _don't_ believe it."

"Your colleague was captured, I'm afraid. But I was able to persuade Gul Kanam that it would be better off if he entrusted the Orb to me for safekeeping. I took it away and then adopted the form of your friend once I was away from him and his plodding troops. That's why I was a little later than you were expecting." He smiled. It didn't look good on him.

This was all too much to take in. But one detail in particular had thrown Ro completely. "The _Orb_?" _That_ was what they'd sent them here to steal?

"Oh, yes; Rakal has been one of the main centres of Cardassian Orb research since well before they became members of the Dominion."

"I don't understand. Why do you _want_ us to have an Orb?"

"Because," Odo said, with a beatific smile, "I have had a _vision_."

Ro sank back into her chair. "Of course you have. The Prophets are real, Orb visions are real, and they've granted one to you. It all makes perfect sense."

"I assure you it does," Odo said. "You see, a better world is possible."

Ro's mouth went dry, her heart felt as though it had dropped in her chest. "What did you say?" she asked quietly.

"A better world is possible," the Changeling repeated.

Ro looked at him. It was impossible to read his expression, and even if it weren't, he was nothing if not a master of deception. But that was exactly what Kai Bareil had told her, the one and only time she'd met him, as her cell had taken their turn in helping him evade the authorities. He'd insisted on reading her Pah, and when he did, his thumb and finger painful against her ear, he'd said nothing more than, "Always remember: _a better world is possible_."

Odo got out of his seat and crossed to the case she had brought in earlier. Ro scrambled to her feet, grabbing the disruptor he had abandoned.

Odo turned round, hands up. "Take a shot, if it will make you feel better. You know it can't harm me."

Ro had seen the footage dozens of times, of Changelings creating holes in their bodies to evade blaster fire without a second thought, even reconstructing themselves from tiny fragments after the explosion of a grenade.

Odo nodded as she put the disruptor down again. "Please, let me do this. I assure you it will make everything clear." He picked up the case and brought it over to her, then flung it open.

And there it was: an _Orb_. It was more beautiful than she could ever have imagined, its two lobes shining with purple light. She stared into it--

_"The situation along the border is deteriorating."_

_The speaker was a woman, dressed in a Starfleet admiral's uniform. Blonde hair, swept back severely. She had the attention of everyone in the room, not because she demanded it but simply because she expected it._

_"We need the Enterprise to maintain a firm presence in the Demilitarised Zone. A reassurance to legitimate Federation colonies, a deterrent to any Cardassians who might fancy their chances--"_

_"And Federation citizens on the Cardassian side of the border?"_

_Ro turned to see who the new speaker was. She recognised him instantly. Even on Bajor, far from the Federation core worlds, Captain Jean-Luc Picard's leadership of the last defence of Earth was legendary._

_She looked round some more: these were all members of that valiant, doomed crew. She looked down: she was wearing a Starfleet uniform. She was_ part _of that crew._

_The woman was speaking again, replying to Picard's question. "They have been offered the opportunity to resettle. But if they don't take it, the peace treaty must hold. Too much else depends on it: the strategic importance of the Bajoran wormhole is not lost on any of you, I'm sure. So we must ensure that Bajor remains under Federation protection."_

_The Federation, at peace with the Cardassians? Bajor, free of Cardassian occupation?_

_"She does not believe." The voice was flat, somehow, and Ro knew that she was being addressed directly. The woman who had spoken had long black hair._

_"Belief is irrelevant." She turned round to see that Worf was speaking -- or being spoken through. Worf, who had been at the Academy at the same time as her, the only Klingon in Starfleet just as she had been the only Bajoran. She really should have tried harder to get along with him, back then. "Only action matters."_

_"And she will act." This time the android crewmember, another Starfleet legend, Data._

_The person next to her turned round and touched her hand. She looked up to see the face of a man she didn't recognise, a prosthesis across his eyes. "A better world is possible," he told her. Unlike the others, his voice was gentle._

_"A better world is possible," the woman who had spoken first repeated._

_The rest of the Enterprise crew gathered around the table took up the refrain, one after the other. "A better world is possible," said Captain Picard, finally._

_Ro looked to the admiral at the head of the table. "Aren't you going to tell me the same thing?"_

_"That's the thing," the man next to her said gently. "You have to tell her."_

\--and she was back in the patrol craft, exactly where she had been, speeding through the stars with only a Founder for company.

Odo closed the case as Ro continued to blink, trying to take in what she had experienced. "Did you see her?" he asked urgently.

"See who?"

"Nechayev," Odo said.

"Who's that?" Ro asked. Then realisation dawned. "The admiral?"

Odo crossed to the console and began working quickly. Ro could just about discern that he was accessing the secure Dominion subspace communications grid. "In that world, perhaps," Odo said. "But in this one ..." He brought up a data record. It was Nechayev's record, illustrated with a picture of her that was megaparsecs from the Nechayev Ro had seen in the vision: a grainy capture from a security camera of a woman in civilian clothes, blood-stained and covered in soot and ash. The file said that she was one of the Obsidian Order's Most Wanted, suspected of being one of the leaders of the Maquis.

"What exactly do you intend to do?" Ro asked.

"We have to take the Orb to her," Odo said. "Yes, yes, I know you think it's a trick, that I want to capture her myself and get one over on Enabran Tain. But you had the vision. That thing _wants_ to be taken to her."

"What did you see?"

"That's not relevant."

"Yes, it is. If you want me to believe that this isn't all some elaborate scheme to get the Maquis out into the open, tell me what you saw."

Odo sighed. "I was on Terok Nor, except it wasn't Terok Nor, it was a Federation outpost." He paused for a moment. "She was there."

"Nechayev?"

"Yes, yes, Nechayev was there. But that's not who I meant. Someone else was there -- someone who died years ago. In this world." His voice seemed full of sorrow and regret.

"And in that one?"

"She was a Major. In the Bajoran military." That fit with the idea of a Bajor under Federation protection from her own vision. "Still alive." His voice almost cracked as he said the last two words.

"The way you talk about her ..." Ro said. Could it really be: one of the leaders of the Dominion in love with a Bajoran?

"But it wasn't her, really," Odo went on. "It was as though ..."

"The Prophets were speaking through her?"

"I don't know if the wormhole aliens are prophets or not," Odo said.

"I'm not sure I do, either," Ro said. "Even after ..."

"But I do believe what they told me. And they told me what I told you: that a better world is possible. And that the way to find it is to get that Orb to Nechayev."

Ro nodded reluctantly. "It's going to be more difficult than you think to find her. I still have _some_ contacts from my Starfleet days who are still alive, but the Maquis aren't going to believe some fantastical story about ancient aliens and mysterious orbs."

"No," Odo said. "So we're not going to tell them that."

"Oh? Then what are we going to tell them?"

"It's very simple," Odo said. "We'll tell them that you've captured me."


	2. Fortune Favours The Bold

**Dytallix B, Maquis rendezvous point, 2375**

Alynna looked out from the cave at the storm-racked sky, phaser at the ready.

She had heard the descending shuttle land; it should be one of the others, or perhaps their mysterious visitor. But the possibility that they had been exposed to the Dominion was never far away. She couldn't be sure until ...

A figure appeared, silhouetted against the entrance to the cave by a sudden burst of sheet lightning. She would recognise that figure anywhere, even if he had lost a few pounds in a life on the run.

She holstered the phaser for now and walked towards him. The desire to fling her arms around him and never let go of him again was fierce, but there were certain precautions that had to be taken.

They each offered their forearms simultaneously, which made them both laugh.

"Do me first," Ben said. "You were here before me."

"All the more reason for you to think that I might be a Founder, surely?" Alynna said, but she dug into her pocket for her hyposampler and applied it to his arm. The blood that emerged was real, human blood, and stayed that way once she had taken the sampler away.

"If they ever managed to replace you, then it would all be over," Ben said, as he did the same to her in return.

Only when her sample had shown her humanity did they finally embrace. "I've missed you," she said.

"Life on the run is barely any life at all," Ben said.

"You know we can only meet up when it's something really important."

"I'd love to say that _we_ were important," Ben said. "But the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy quadrant."

"We'll always have Risa," Alynna said. It was the last shore leave they'd ever taken, before Starfleet was put onto a permanent emergency footing, and then ... the fall of the Federation.

"Is Edward coming?" Ben asked.

"He's been here for some time," came a voice from behind them. Alynna had been so wrapped up in seeing Ben again that she hadn't heard the whine of the transporter beam. "But I didn't want to interrupt your little reunion."

"We have terrible operational security," Alynna said, patting Ben's arm so that he let go of her.

"If he were a Changeling he'd have shot us by now. Or ensnared us in a net made of his own body or something."

Edward smiled for a moment, then offered up his forearm for them to sample. They did the same for him.

"So, Admiral--" he began, once the formalities were concluded.

"How many times have I told you not to call me that?" Alynna said. It had been a field promotion under dire circumstances.

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as I have a ship, there's a Starfleet. And as long as you're around, I'll take orders from you."

"That battered old Bird of Prey is hardly the _Cairo_ ," Alynna said. But it was the Maquis's best weapon, using its cloaking device to execute raids from Bolius to Legara IV, though their wildest hopes of drawing the Cardassian-Dominion alliance into war with the Klingons had never been realised.

Their conversation was cut short by the whine of engines outside -- far more powerful than the shuttle Ben had arrived on.

"I think our visitors must be here," Ben said.

"Do we believe them?" Edward said.

"I don't know what to believe," Alynna said. "But I think we should hear them out."

"We should separate," Edward said. "Stand far apart from each other. Give us a fighting chance if this is a trick."

Alynna nodded, and they took up positions along the back wall of the cave. Quietly, she thumbed her phaser up to its maximum setting. Even a Changeling couldn't survive being vaporised, and if they all fired at once, perhaps ...

Two figures appeared in the entrance to the cave.

"Hello?" came a female voice. Presumably this was the Bajoran, Ro Laren. Alynna's deputy who had received the encrypted message had confirmed that he had known her at the Academy. But there was no way to know that she hadn't been replaced by a Founder, the information that had seemed genuine about her past supplied by the Obsidian Order.

"Get on with it," came another voice, rather gruffly.

Alynna signalled minutely to the others not to respond, then beckoned them inside.

The pair walked into the cave; Ro was carrying something rather bulky.

Alynna stepped forward. "Is that the quantum stasis device?" she asked, nodding at the box she seemed to be holding. The message had explained that this was how the threat of shapeshifting could be neutralised. Quite how Ro was supposed to have got hold of one had not been explained.

"I'm afraid they don't exist," the Changeling said. "The Cardassians were researching one at one time, in the earliest years after we made contact with them, but I'm sure you'll understand that we put a stop to that as soon as they joined the Dominion."

Alynna pulled out her phaser.

"Wait, wait!" Ro said. "Please listen. It's important."

"You tricked us," Alynna said. "This is a trap."

"Yes, we tricked you," Ro said. "But it's not a trap. It's just that _this_ is rather difficult to explain." She hefted the case slightly in her arms, to indicate that it was what she was talking about.

"So if it's not a stasis device, what is it?" Ben asked from across the cave.

"What do you know about the Tears of the Prophets?" Ro asked.

Alynna snorted. "If you were looking for experts on Bajoran religion, you've come to the wrong place."

" _This_ is the Orb of Time. Intendant Odo and I have both experienced ... visions. For some reason, it wants to be brought to you."

"A better world is possible," Odo said.

"We think the Orb thinks _you_ are the way to reach it," Ro said.

"Us?" Edward asked.

"Her," Odo said shortly. "Specifically her."

"Wait," Alynna said. "Isn't this a good world, from your point of view?" she asked the Intendant.

"He has personal reasons," Ro said.

Odo cut across her. "I was in the Alpha Quadrant for years before I learned of my heritage. I helped the Cardassians maintain ... order. But I tried to do it with a leavening of justice." Alynna had seen the footage of far too many show trials to believe in Cardassian justice, but she let him go on. "Even in my new role, I've tried to curb the worst excesses of the Cardassian treatment of the Bajoran population," Odo said. The look on Ro's face suggested that she thought little of his efforts. "But I do believe that a _more just_ world is possible."

"Please, just ..." Ro said.

"Just what?"

"Let us _show_ you."

"Wait there," Alynna said. "I want to talk to the others."

She backed away, keeping her phaser trained on them. Ben and Edward gathered in again. If they were going to be attacked, now would be the time.

The moment of tension passed. Perhaps this wasn't a trick after all. Or at least, not the type of trick they feared.

"Are they talking about what I think they're talking about?" Ben asked.

Alynna sighed deeply. Back at the Academy, the compulsory Temporal Mechanics: Fitting In In The Past and Avoiding Paradoxes module had filled her with dread of one day being caught up in such nonsense. But she said, "Earth would have been destroyed nearly a century ago by the alien probe, if it hadn't been for--"

"James T. Kirk bringing back a breeding pair of whales and a cetacean biologist who helped us avoid the population bottleneck via cloning from samples of other whales," Edward said. "We all know that story."

"There's more, though," Alynna said. " _Far_ more. You never saw the sealed _Discovery_ files."

"So you think it's possible?" Ben asked.

"I think that anything is worth a shot, at this point," Alynna said. "Even if it's incomprehensible non-corporeal aliens acting through our worst enemies."

"At least there's no Temporal Investigations department in the Maquis," Edward said.

"Let us be thankful for small mercies," Alynna said.

Ben pulled her back as she started to walk away. "You're really doing this, aren't you?"

"Don't try to stop me."

"I wasn't going to," Ben said. "I just wanted to say -- good luck." And he kissed her. For a moment, time stopped.

"I'll see you again, Ben," she said. "One way or another."

She disengaged from his embrace and returned to Ro and Odo. "Do it," she said simply.

"Are you ready?" Ro asked.

"As I'll ever be," Alynna said.

Ro opened the casing. For a moment, Alynna saw the Orb, and then its purple light engulfed her--

_Risa. A warm night. Ben lying next to her. But when he spoke, it was not Ben. "A better world is possible," he said._

_"I hope you're right," Alynna said. "But how--"_

_Standing on the balcony of her childhood home, looking out over the skyline, bejewelled with the lights of a thousand skyscrapers, a million humans and aliens living out their lives in the peace secured by the Starfleet that even at the age of eight she was determined to join. Her mother put her arms on her shoulder. "You know, Alynnka," she told her._

_"No, I don't."_

_White nothingness all around. Completely empty, except for -- Dukat. The Cardassian Gul who had somehow become the prophesised Bajoran "Emissary". "A better world is possible," he said. "Even the one who this form belongs to knows in his heart that he is not the true Emissary."_

_"I still don't understand--"_

_Risa. "You must think," Ben said._

_The balcony. "You must_ remember _," her mother said._

_"When did it all change?" Dukat asked, in the blinding white space._

_She was on the bridge of the_ Gryphon _. Consoles exploding everywhere. Comms reading out the messages from the rest of the squadron, Ops the damage reports from all decks._

_"Shields critical. One more direct hit and--"_

_"Captain Jellico requesting orders," Comms put in._

_Navigation turned in his seat. "Commodore Nechayev, what do we do?"_

_The Cardassian squadron had been in nearly as bad a shape. She had pressed forward, hoping to win the engagement and patch up her squadron afterwards. There had been no way to know about the Cardassian reinforcements hiding in the nearby nebula. The whole thing had been a trap all along._

_Comms turned to her, and her voice had changed, just as the others had earlier. "You exist here," she said._

_"You exist here," Ops said._

_"You exist here," Navigation said, then Security, then Vaunar, her Vulcan First Officer._

_"No," Alynna said. "I--"_

_"You_ will _exist here," they said together._

_Just for a moment, she could feel the immense collective effort of will required of even such powerful beings as these, and then--_

* * *

**USS Gryphon, Kepla Sector, 2357**

The red alert siren was wailing, the ship plunged into semi-darkness.

Alynna nearly lost her footing at the disorientation of being back in the real world, but not the dark, dank cave on Dytallix B.

She quickly took in that she was in her quarters on board the _Gryphon_. A half-finished meal lay abandoned on the table, a PADD lying next to it showing the middle of a chapter in _The Brothers Karamazov_.

The captain's quarters of an _Ambassador_ class were hardly luxurious, but compared to the accommodations she had grown used to over the last few years, it seemed like paradise.

Fighting the instinct to jog to the turbolift and go to the bridge, she went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. She was still _herself_ , her _older_ self, face etched with the lines of two decades' more living and the scars of four years of leading a guerrilla war.

"All hands, this is the bridge." Her own voice on the communicator: that settled it, she had not replaced her past self but simply been transported here. "We have engaged an enemy reconnaissance patrol."

"Computer, what's the stardate?" she asked.

"Stardate 33522.3," replied the computer in its calm, steady voice, amidst the din of the siren and running feet outside as the crew went to their battle stations.

The eve of the Battle of Kepla, the turning point of the war. The Cardassians had drawn the squadron she had commanded into a trap, ambushing and nearly completely destroying it. The _Gryphon_ itself had been lost. She remembered well the way her own escape pod had shaken all around her as it ejected violently, even as she was still arguing with Vaunar. He had bundled her inside, insisting that it was not logical for her to go down with the ship. She remembered being picked up by the _Rutledge_ , the only capital ship to survive the engagement, and the long journey back in cramped conditions with all the other survivors, the ship limping all the way back to Utopia Planitia at Warp 2. Almost as though the Cardassians had wanted to allow someone to take home news of their defeat, their humiliation.

It had not been the end, but it had been the beginning of the end. With the nearest other Starfleet ships days away, the Cardassian fleet had been able to sweep through sector after sector of Federation space, bombing newly formed colonies into oblivion and landing huge numbers of troops on worlds with larger populations to establish martial law. The Federation had signed a peace treaty almost entirely on the Cardassians' terms, ceding huge swathes of territory, even agreeing to scuttle several major shipyards, in order that those citizens were released to be resettled. Many, in the civilian population and in Starfleet, had rejoiced at the end of the senseless bloodshed. But Alynna and a few others had known how bad the strategic position now was.

Still, there had been peace, for a decade or so. The Federation had continued on, much as it ever had, even accepting refugees from Cardassian space like Ro Laren. Alynna herself had become an Admiral in a much-reduced Starfleet, desperately trying to make the resources available to her stretch, with long borders to be defended with not only the enlarged Cardassian Union but also a Romulan Empire that emerged from a century of isolation, emboldened by the Federation's humiliation. The Galaxy-class programme, supposed to provide a new generation of multi-purpose starships to form the core of the fleet, had been curtailed, with only three ships ever produced, the _Yamato_ being lost soon after launch in the Iconian crisis. And so, when the Cardassian forces occupying Bajor had discovered the wormhole and allied themselves with the fearsome Dominion, they had returned to finish what they had started, Jem'hadar and Cardassian warships working in tandem to obliterate Starfleet entirely in just a few weeks. The _Enterprise_ 's leadership of the final defence of Earth had held off the massed fleet for two days, but with seemingly endless reinforcements arriving all the time, there had never been any real hope.

With Cardassian troops in Lagos, San Francisco and Paris, the Federation, as a political entity, had had no choice but abject surrender. But its people were another matter: resistance had flared up on dozens upon dozens of major worlds across the quadrant, taking inspiration from guerrilla movements in their violent pre-histories. Andorian _rodeeria_ , Betazoid _kazans_ , Tellarite _m'shtaka_ , and many others, all did their best to sabotage Cardassian infrastructure and assassinate high-ranking officials. But it was the human term that came to be used as an umbrella for these disparate groups: the Maquis. And though each autonomous cell made its own decisions on targets and tactics, Alynna had found herself cast into the role of figurehead for the struggle.

Perhaps now, though, she had the opportunity to change all of that. To save millions of lives, to preserve freedom for the peoples of a thousand star system. _A better world is possible,_ the aliens had said.

In one way, her mission here was simple. But how to do it, where to change history, remained opaque to her. Should she reveal herself to her past self? She could imagine her Academy tutors' horrified reaction to that idea. Or act in the shadows, nudging events in the right direction? What even was the right direction?

The paralysis of indecision was an unfamiliar sensation. But she remained caught in it until the siren suddenly stopped and the ship's lighting returned to normal.

It was only when the stars outside the window transformed into spectral streaks, as the _Gryphon_ jumped to warp, that she realised she had made her decision after all. She had never been one to shy away from the direct approach. She would meet her past self and explain things to her, help herself to figure out the best course of action. The fact that she could not remember such an encounter in her own past was a _good_ thing; history would already have been changed.

She decided to make one slight adjustment, though: she crossed to the replicator and had it create an Admiral's uniform, then changed into it. She may as well leverage her past self's respect for hierarchy.

She had only just finished adjusting her sleeves when the doors swished open and in walked _Commodore_ Nechayev.

"Apologies, Admiral," she began. "No one told me--" She could see in her own eyes the thought processes she was going through as she caught up with the evidence of her senses. "Who the--?"

"I know," Alynna said. "You promised yourself you'd never get mixed up in this sort of thing."

"This is some sort of Cardassian trick," Commodore Nechayev said instantly.

"I wish that it were."

"If you're me--"

"You've just encountered a small Cardassian patrol and are following their warp trail back to their staging area." She nodded at the table. "You're bored of the book, but feel you have to keep going because your mother always encouraged you to read the classics. When you have a moment to spare for your personal life, you think there's a spark between you and Ben Maxwell, but that he's still grieving for his family after Setlik III so it would be a bad idea to pursue it."

"Telepathy. You're, I don't know, a Betazoid defector working for the Obsidian Order who's been surgically altered--"

"You will follow the Cardassians back, but it's a trap. You're never going to finish the book. You'll eventually have a magical week on Risa with Ben, but after that you'll both be too busy for anything more than a snatched moment, on the rare occasions when it's even safe for you to be in the same place at the same time."

Commodore Nechayev snorted. "And I'm going to be an Admiral?"

Alynna smiled back, ruefully. "Yes, you are. And I'm here to make sure you stay that way, rather than ending up like me."

"I don't understand."

"Check the replicator log." She held up the bundle of clothes she'd discarded. " _This_ is your uniform these days." She could see in her own face the unwillingness to accept the implications. "Starfleet burned. The Federation fell."

"And you're here to--"

"This is the turning point," Alynna said. "In _my_ timeline, you pursued the scouts and found a few Galor-class ships. You assembled the squadron and attacked, expecting a ."

"So what happened?"

Alynna crossed to the large display screen built into the wall and brought up a star map, zooming in on the nebula a few light-years distant. "There's a much larger Cardassian fleet hiding here, obscured from our sensors by the heavily ionised plasma."

"That can't be right," Commodore Nechayev said. "Cardassian hulls aren't strong enough to withstand continual exposure to that sort of environment. Even the _Gryphon_ ..."

"We had a long time on the way home to figure it out," Alynna said. "They were channelling all power to shields, even running life support at minimum. They can't have enjoyed the cold very much."

"So, you're here to save me from a trap, and ... what, the whole Federation?"

Alynna adjusted the display to show the locations of the rest of the fleet. "Once they destroy your squadron, they have freedom to move into ... two dozen Federation sectors."

Commodore Nechayev nodded grimly. "But--"

"There's more," Alynna said. "But ... I'll be honest, I'm not sure how much I should tell you." She wasn't sure whether she was withholding the existence of the Bajoran wormhole and the Dominion because she thought it would be too unbelievable for her past self to accept, or because she didn't want to have too large an effect on the timeline.

"What do you suggest I do? Disengage the pursuit? What do I tell the others?"

"Don't tell them anything, show them."

"You said it yourself, they're using the nebula to evade our sensors."

Alynna leaned in towards her. There was just a moment of vertigo at the sight of her own face -- so like a reflection, yet not -- but then it passed. "Because you don't ... I mean, we didn't -- dammit! Look, I'm telling you, now, that they're there. So you can find them."

Commodore Nechayev grinned. "So we can search for them."

* * *

Alynna stayed in the quarters for the next few hours, anxiously awaiting the outcome.

Eventually, her past self set up a feed from the wardroom for her to watch the conference. She had pulled the squadron together; the Captains of half a dozen ships were clustered around the table, standing room only for the trusted aides they had brought with them from their senior staff. Edward was there, and Ben too -- so young he looked; Alynna wanted to reach out through the screen and touch him.

A meeting just like this one had taken place on the eve of the battle, in her timeline. But now things would be different.

"Are we sure about this?" Ben was saying. "Those could be sensor ghosts, reflections from the nebula of the pair of cruisers we saw the scouts returning to."

"The _Gryphon_ team's analysis checks out, sir," said his Tactical Chief from behind him -- O'Brien, Alynna remembered.

Edward spoke up next. "With respect, though, Commodore, what made you think to do that analysis? Devoting the entire sensor array to ultra low frequency interferometry is hardly standard procedure, especially on the way to a hot zone. You would have been blind to any approaching ships."

"I ... ah, received intelligence," Commodore Nechayev said.

"Well, it's a damned good thing for all of us that you did, as far as I can see." Captain Thassev of the _Grelth_.

"So what's the plan?" Edward asked.

"We can't win against those sorts of numbers," Thassev said, her antennae nodding towards the shadowy outlines of the Cardassian cruisers on the sensor display.

"If we call in the rest of the fleet, we'll be leaving too many other parts of the border undefended," Commodore Nechayev said. Alynna had impressed on her that she it was vital she change the broad sweep of history, not just the details.

"It would take too long for them to get here anyway," Edward said.

"I don't like the idea of retreating," Ben said.

"None of us do," Commodore Nechayev replied.

"We might not have to," O'Brien said. "Sorry, sir, ma'am--" with a nod to her past self "--I'm just thinking out loud."

Alynna leaned in towards the screen. She could almost feel it, the spark of something _new_ , something genuinely different. Might this be the tiny pebble that diverted the course of the great river of history?

She watched intently as her past self exchanged a look with Ben. Wordlessly, Ben communicated his trust in his officer, and Commodore Nechayev said, "I'm open to any options at this point."

"This nebula is rich in calendenium, right?" O'Brien said.

"Which reacts with hydrogen," Vaunar said. "Which the nebula, naturally, has in abundance. But its temperature is far too low to establish a chain reaction. I assume that that is what you are proposing?"

Thassev spoke up next. "Perhaps there is a way to excite the calendenium." Alynna had forgotten that he had been in the Science division before switching to the command track.

"The main deflector dish!" O'Brien shouted out. "Sorry, ma'am, sirs, but ..."

Alynna grinned fiercely as she watched them continue, ironing out the details. Her last few years had been lived on the run, only making contact with her operatives for fleeting moments. This was what she had missed, Starfleet at its best: collaboration, teamwork, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

* * *

"I don't know that I like this plan, but it's the best one we've got."

Her past self was sat opposite her at the table. She had insisted on feeding Alynna, and she had to admit that the output of the _Gryphon_ 's replicators was far more palatable than the ration bars she had grown accustomed to. The ones stolen from the Cardassians were bad enough, but it was the ones that at times they had had to buy from Ferengi smugglers for an inflated price that were the worst.

Alynna swallowed down another mouthful of potato, and said, "People always told me I was pragmatic. But I was never sure I believed it until I saw how easily you took to meeting your future self."

"How bad is it?" Commodore Nechayev was staring directly at her. "In the time you came from?"

Alynna put down her fork. "Bad. Very bad. We know about conditions on Bajor by now, as I remember." A nod. "Imagine all the worlds of the Federation under Cardassian occupation. Earth under martial law. Billions executed." She looked at herself shrewdly, the haunted look in her own eyes. "Why?"

"Whatever it is we're doing, it _isn't_ honorable warfare," Commodore Nechayev said.

Alynna suddenly remembered the posting she had had as a lieutenant, liaising with the Klingon Defence Forces, back when the eerily silent Romulans had seemed the biggest threat. "Laying a trap like this is hardly honorable, either."

"It's not the Cardassians I'm concerned about. What sort of tactics do _you_ use?"

"It's a long time since I had the luxury of worrying about honour," she said.

"You're a terrorist, aren't you?"

"So the Cardassians say," Alynna admitted. "And yes, so you would say as well. So I would have said, when I was you. Perspectives change. But if this works--"

"It's going to work," Commodore Nechayev said.

"No, I mean, if my coming to the past works, if we do change the course of history--"

"You want me to weigh up one atrocity now against countless future ones."

"You know what the Cardassians--"

"I'm not talking about the Cardassians."

Alynna looked down for a moment, then back up, looking directly into her counterpart's eyes. "I know. And yes, that is what I am asking you. Not for my sake, not for yours, but for the whole Federation."

She felt herself fixed, inspected, by the gaze of the other woman. And she did seem _other_ now, in a way that she hadn't until this moment, as though the timelines were already beginning to diverge, this woman no longer part of a history that led to _her_ existence. Eventually, she spoke. "It's like you said. We're a pragmatist." She got up from the table and retreated to the bedroom. "Finish your meal if you want; I've lost my appetite."

* * *

Alynna sat in the shuttlecraft, scanning the sensor displays intently.

As far as anyone in the squadron knew, the shuttle was unmanned, little more than a beefed-up early warning probe if the Cardassian ships that were supposed to be the bait realised that the squadron had bypassed them. But between a deft site-to-site transport and some sensor spoofing, Commodore Nechayev had been able to place her on board.

It was a favour to Alynna -- she had asked for the chance to be part of things, in some small way. But it also felt as though it was a punishment her past self had imposed on her.

Alynna didn't care about her own life; what mattered was that her counterpart would live on into a new future. A future she shouldn't, couldn't, be part of. She didn't care if her shuttle was blasted to pieces by a Cardassian kinetic missile.

There was no activity from the Cardassian decoy group yet, however. Alynna watched as the squadron aligned themselves before the nebula.

The early warning her shuttle was there to provide was needed because for the next few minutes the squadron would be nearly defenceless, diverting all power to main deflectors, tuned to an incredibly precise frequency that would have almost perfect conversion into excitation of the calendenium ions within the nebula. It was almost the inverse of what the Cardassians inside the nebula were doing to be able to survive inside it. But in the same way that they were hidden from the Starfleet ships, what the Starfleet ships were doing would be almost undetectable by them.

Alynna looked up from the displays to see in realspace as the squadron began, great blue-white beams projecting forwards, raking over the nebula's diffuse border.

A countdown ticked into life on the side of her display. Alynna waited through all the long countdown, her attention split between the sensor screens and the near-blinding display in front of her.

The decoy ships had finally begun to move. She transmitted the "automated" warning message to the _Gryphon_ , but even as she did so she was already calculating that they would be too late. By the time they reached weapons range, the squadron would have finished, and could restore power to shields.

They had done it.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the sensor display on her screen was overridden by a live feed from the _Gryphon_ 's bridge. She inspected the codes that had been used to do it, and recognised them as her own.

She watched as Commodore Nechayev got up from her command seat and crossed over to Tactical. She understood now the purpose of the transmission: her past self wanted her to know that she was taking the burden of doing this on her own conscience.

The terrible truth of it was that, the nebula having been primed by the input of deflector energy, a single photon torpedo would do the job.

Alynna watched her own finger press down hard on the tactical console.

Looking up, she saw the tiny red dot of the torpedo streaking out from the _Gryphon_ , and then, a moment later, it began: a chain reaction spread across the nebula, punctuated by more violent explosions as the conflagration engulfed each Cardassian ship in turn, overwhelming the shields and triggering a warp core breach.

"A better world is possible," she whispered. But did it have to be born in such terrible violence?

And then the bright light of the exploding nebula took on a growing purple tinge. No, the purple light was inside the shuttle, it was all around her, it was the Orb--


	3. The Art of Misdirection

**Planet 9344516-νλ, Borg space, 2375**

Alynna nearly fell over as she returned to the present.

"Are you all right?" Edward said, putting out his arms to steady her.

She pulled herself upright again and let go of him. Looking at her arms, she saw that she was wearing a Starfleet uniform, as she had been in the "past"; but this one was battered and stained. "Thank you. Yes, I'm all right, I think." She looked around. "Where's Ben?"

"Alynna, are you sure you're all right?"

"You heard me: _where's Ben?_ "

Edward looked sorrowful, but also confused and concerned. "Ben didn't make it."

"What happened? He was supposed to be on the way here--"

"Alynna, Ben died years ago now. At the battle of Wolf 359."

He had to put his hand out to steady her again. His words had triggered a cascade of memories, and she gradually realised what they were: the _other_ Alynna's memories, the Alynna who had fired the torpedo into the nebula at Kepla. Nearly two decades of two mutually contradictory histories were desperately trying to reintegrate within her mind.

She had been brought back to the present, but it was the new present.

The Battle of Kepla had been the fulcrum on which history had turned, just as she had hoped. Just as decisive as it had been in her original timeline, but in this one it had been the opportunity Starfleet had needed to turn the tide of the war. A fleet larger than any the Federation had ever assembled before had swept into Cardassian space. Oppressive military rule had been ended, the Detapa Council restored. For a few years, people had talked about a new Golden Age for a deeply spiritual people, lifted out of dependence on the resources of subjugated worlds by technology freely gifted by a Federation that was nothing if not magnanimous in victory. The most optimistic even imagined Cardassia eventually applying to become a full member.

But with peace restored, and large numbers of new ships to be put to use, Starfleet had returned to doing what it always did best: exploration and discovery. Except, this time, they had discovered unimaginable horror. With Cardassian space freely open for the first time, long range ships had headed out towards the Delta Quadrant, where they had encountered the terrible threat of the Borg.

The Borg's motives were simple, but their tactics were hard to fathom. Why had they bypassed so much territory nearer their own to come straight for the Federation? Some said that they saw the Federation as a possible future threat to their own existence that needed to be ended, but in the light of their crushing victory it was hard not to think of that as hubris. And crushing it had been, millions of cubes descending on the Alpha Quadrant. With Starfleet stretched thin throughout Federation and Cardassian space, and beyond, there had been no real resistance. The Klingons and the Romulans, their cloaking devices at least partially effective against Borg sensors, had lasted slightly longer, but eventually they too had fallen.

"This is _not_ a better world," she said finally.

"A better world than what?" Edward asked, confused.

"We're about to have visitors, aren't we?" Of course they were, she knew this; she had always known this.

"I don't know whether we should trust them," Edward said. "But Janeway is one of the best Captains in the fleet."

In this timeline, a few Starfleet ships were all that remained of a free Federation: a rag-tag assortment of refugees always trying to stay one step ahead of the ever-expanding Borg sphere of influence, just as so many others had been before them. Alynna remembered -- a clear memory, from a time before the divergence in the timelines -- reading about the El-Aurians. _This_ timeline's Alynna had bitterly regretted not recognising the importance of their story.

Alynna looked up. The visitors were here: a woman wearing a Starfleet captain's uniform, pointing a chunky phaser rifle at a Borg drone. An assimilated female human, not that there was anything particularly unusual about that.

The drone was carrying the same Orb casing as Ro and Odo had brought to her in the other timeline.

"I hope you know what you're doing, bringing one of those things here," Edward told Captain Janeway.

"If it wanted to assimilate us, it would have done by now," Alynna said. "If the good captain here hadn't managed to incinerated it first."

"Tell them what you told me," Janeway said to the drone.

The drone spoke, its various attachments whirring as it did. "I am Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01. I--"

Alynna waved her silent. "Where did you get that?" she asked, nodding at the casing.

"Do you recognise it?" Edward asked.

"I'll explain later."

"This unit was tasked with cataloguing artefacts from one of the archives left behind by Species 2000 on Planet 553992-αθ," the drone said. "However, records show that this artefact was brought there from Planet 561299-οδ--"

"Bajor," Janeway put in.

"--and furthermore, it seems to be the product of what may well be an unknown Species. I have reason to believe that this Species may have aspects of its existence beyond present Borg understanding, and it may even be possible that its technological and cultural distinctiveness cannot be added to the Borg Collective."

"That must be terribly disappointing for you," Edward said, with heavy sarcasm.

Alynna waved him quiet. "You keep saying 'I'," she noted.

Janeway nodded. "She claims that she has separated herself from the Collective. She _claims_ that she is part of a resistance movement within the Borg."

Alynna looked at the Borg more carefully. Was there a spark of individuality, buried deep in her one visible eye?

"Much of this is ... difficult," the drone said. "Existence without the Collective is extremely difficult."

"I didn't even know it was _possible_ ," Edward said.

"The artefact--" the drone, if she was still a drone, hefted it for emphasis "--has helped me, I believe. It has caused me to experience ... subjective neural states with no objective physical correlates in my sensor records."

"She had a _vision_ ," Janeway said. Then, more quietly, "So did I."

Alynna had a feeling she knew what the visions had been about, at least in outline. _A better world is possible._ But Edward spoke before she had the chance to; remembering the two separate timelines was difficult, like deciphering a palimpsest. "Tell us more about this resistance movement," Edward demanded.

"It is ... difficult to explain. A very small proportion of drones, among which I find myself, retain elements of our individuality during the regeneration cycle."

"She's free when she dreams," Janeway said. "It's almost poetic."

"And is this resistance movement going to be any use to us? Is that why you've brought her here?" This last to Janeway.

"It is impossible for us to act when the Collective is co-ordinated. Following my experience with the artefact, I believe there may be ways to disrupt that. But the artefact itself seems to have more pressing needs."

Alynna spoke now, before Edward could interrogate her further. "It wants me, doesn't it?" She looked at Janeway. "You had a vision too, you said."

Janeway nodded. "A better world is possible," she said, but she sounded doubtful. Alynna wondered exactly what she had seen.

Edward looked thoroughly confused, even more so than he had at the idea of a Borg resistance.

"You're not going to believe this," Alynna said, "but I've been here before. But not like this." She pointed at the Orb casing. "That thing sent me back in time. I changed history. And then I found myself back here."

"You changed history?" Edward said. "You're trying to take the credit for the mess we're in?" He gestured to indicate the Borg drone in front of them.

"Where I came from, the Cardassians had won the war. I was trying to-- It's not important. But this is a second chance, I think. Somehow, that artefact, the Orb, is being drawn towards me, even across parallel universes."

Edward made a noise halfway between derision and disgust.

"I don't expect you to believe me," Alynna said. "I don't _need_ you to believe me." She turned to the Borg. "Open it."

Purple light flung outwards and--

_Her mother, in an apartment half-a-kilometre above ground level, fully equipped with a modern 24th-century replicator, determinedly preparing bread by hand, kneading the dough over and over. "A better world is possible," she said._

_"This_ isn't _a better world," Alynna said._

_"Watch me, little one. Watch what I am doing." She was still kneading the dough, working it over and over. "Too little, the bread is heavy and dense. No good. Too much, the bread is heavy and dense. No good."_

_Risa, Ben lying next to her. "A better world is possible."_

_Suddenly, the drone, Seven of Nine, was standing at the end of their bed. "A better world is possible." Her Borg prostheses melted away, only a thin silver patch remaining around the socket of her eye._

_Blank whiteness once more. Nothing and no one, not even Dukat. There_ is _no Emissary, never has been, never will be. An endless, eternal moment of nothingness. A better world is possible, but there is no reassurance here._

_And then, back in her childhood home, her mother sliding the loaf into the oven. "You have to get it just right. But you can't know that you have until it's done baking."_

_"So I have to try again?"_

_"A better world is possible."_

_"But I tried--"_

_"Think," her mother said._

_"Remember," Ben said, his hand stroking her cheek._

_The drone was still there, but somehow now she was a child. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again."_

_The bridge of the_ Gryphon _, during the Battle of Kepla. Explosions everywhere--_

 _The bridge of the_ Gryphon _, before the one-sided slaughter she had initiated. Her finger was hovering over the Tactical display, waiting to fire._

_Further back. The conference on the eve of battle. Ben again, but Edward too. "A better world is possible," he was saying, but he sounded sceptical._

_No. Further back again. The same people, another place. Before the deployment of the squadron._

_A party. Or perhaps a wake, held in advance._

_Edward was there, banging on the table to attract attention. He proposed a toast: "A better world is possible."_

_The assembled command staff of an entire squadron raised their glasses. "A better world is possible."_

* * *

**Starbase 375, 2357**

Alynna had braced herself this time, so the transition was less of a shock to her.

She was on the observation deck, looking out over the assembled craft of the squadron. _Her_ squadron, or rather, that belonging to her past self, wherever she was -- probably down at the party in Recreation Hall #7, though she remembered she had left early. The first command she had held above a single ship, but far from the last, in any version of the timeline she'd experienced.

Alynna looked around, confirming that she was alone. No one had seen her appear. Did the wormhole aliens have the ability to mask their manipulations from the sensors, or might an eagle-eyed Security officer appear at any moment to challenge her?

She stepped away from the huge window to a quieter area, less immediately obvious to any newcomers. "Computer, tell me the stardate," she said quietly.

As on the _Gryphon_ , the computer's low-level subsystems seemed willing to accept her voiceprint without sending a query to higher processing nodes about how she could be in two places at once. "Stardate 33486.8."

She stared out of the window at the ships. The _Gryphon_ was the largest, flanked by the _Cairo_ and two more Excelsior-class starships. Ben's _Rutledge_ and the _Grelth_ contributed most of the rest of the squadron's capability, with two old-but-serviceable Soyuz class ships and even an unmodified Miranda class for picket and escort duty.

The squadron that had fought the Battle of Kepla: in one timeline, routed by an ambush that no one could have predicted; in another, forewarned with future knowledge, all those ships, even the oldest and smallest, had poured the entire output of their warp core into the nebula through their main deflectors for eight long minutes, contributing to a famous victory.

Neither timeline had had a desirable outcome. But the aliens still believed that a better was possible, had still used their strange influence over people to bend history towards the same point, of sending her back in time.

The vision she had had as she was slippery in her memory, as though it was not really there at all. What was it the drone had said? "Subjective neural states with no objective physical correlates." But she remembered the image of her mother, kneading the dough. Too little or too much were just as bad; she had to get it just right.

Her previous intervention had been too drastic. She could see that now. Subtlety was required. Alynna began to smile to herself. On her last attempt, she had approached the problem as a military commander. But Starfleet trained its command staff to be diplomats as well. Politicians.

"Computer, give me a route to the nearest unoccupied office space that minimises the chances of me being observed by any Starfleet officer."

There was a pause, and for a moment, she wondered if the computer was going to refer her request sufficiently high up its decision tree to alert someone in Security to such an odd request. But then it simply said, "Working," and a moment later a panel in the far wall lit up.

Alynna took one last look at the view of the squadron through the window, and crossed to the turbolift.

As she got in and let the computer take her to the destination it had chosen, a sudden vision of the sight of the same ships, wrecked at the first iteration of the Battle of Kepla, swam unbidden into her mind.

* * *

The nearest space turned out to be a disused conference room, far larger than any one person needed. Alynna sat herself at a terminal as far as possible from the doorways, and left the lighting off. She had, however, activated the large display set into the conference table in front of her, showing the current progress of the war.

Looking at the map strategically, taking her squadron straight to the Kepla sector was the right choice. She could hardly fault herself for having done so back then -- for being about to do so, she corrected herself with a curse -- given all the information Starfleet had available. But they had no way to know about the ambush the Cardassians had planned.

Walking straight into it, as she had in the original timeline, was not an option. And nor, it seemed, was confronting it straight on. She shook her head for a moment, as a decade's memories of life on the run from the Borg tried to cram themselves into her consciousness all at once. For a moment, her sense of self swam alarmingly out of focus: which version of the last eighteen years had she lived through?

The terrifying truth was that it was both. Both had been horrific, in their different ways. Both had ended with the bright dream of peace and unity across the galaxy that the Federation represented turned into an almost desperate source of inspiration for a tiny few who had managed to hold on.

She had the chance to help the Federation survive as something more than an ideal, to _thrive_ ; for surely, it was a galaxy with a thriving Federation that the aliens meant by "a better world". And the Federation's best ideals were never about warfare and battle -- leave that to the Klingons.

So she looked at the map again, reminding herself to view it like a politician, a diplomat. On the extreme end of the range of the warzone assigned to her squadron was a small cluster of non-aligned worlds. Two were pre-warp civilisations, as yet uncontacted by the Federation and their planets thankfully low enough in natural resources to have avoided the attentions of the Cardassians. In the timeline she had originally experienced, they had been subjugated in the end, along with many others. And in the other timeline, their people had become yet more Borg drones, their "technological and biological distinctiveness" subsumed into the Collective.

She studied the map further. There were three worlds with which the Federation had some type of relations. One was a far-flung human colony, seeded in the 22nd Century diaspora, which clung to xenophobic views that the rest of humanity had long since given up. Another was peopled by an aquatic species not dissimilar to Earth's dolphins, currently applying for Federation membership. The final one had three competing power blocs, all possessing warp travel. The world had been of interest to scholars of planetary development, as an apparent counterexample to Hodgkin's Law, though Alynna considered those scholars to have forgotten the circumstances under which Zefram Cochrane had first developed the warp drive.

Perhaps, if she could find a way to draw the squadron towards these worlds, they would avoid an engagement in the Kepla sector until the Cardassian fleet had been forced to withdraw from the nebula, their shields finally exhausted by the continual heavy ion bombardment.

Relieved to discover that she still remembered her access codes, Alynna consulted the latest reports from the various sources they had available. The two pre-first-contact worlds had active monitoring missions, both reporting normal cultural and technological development -- any mention of the Cardassians was strictly in terms of the teams' own concerns about being so close to the frontline. The latest submissions from the water-dwellers were, if anything, trying to use the war as a justification to accelerate their path towards membership. They offered up novel techniques for long-range subspace monitoring, based on their natural abilities, as well as their world's strategic location. The xenophobes were constantly demanding Federation protection, even though they were ideologically far closer to the Cardassian position.

Which left the world with its non-unified polities. The system was called Agrax, she read in the file, or at least, that was the name it had been given by Vulcan cartographers several centuries ago. Each of the competing powers had their own name for the system. Although all three power blocs had ships with a maximum speed well below Warp Two, each had begun to establish colonies around various neighbouring stars. A tense cold war just about held throughout their home system, "defence" stations placed in orbit of all the major worlds and moons ready to destroy each other the moment the temperature rose. The small team of Federation diplomats trying to manage the situation had even shared with all sides simulations of the high probability of a Kessler Syndrome outcome if such a conflict began, but this had had only limited success in encouraging disarmament. On current projections, they would only create enough junk in orbit to deny themselves access to space five times over, instead of the previous seven.

Alynna reviewed the technical data on the armaments. A single starship -- even an ancient _Constitution_ class -- would be able to destroy the whole lot with a few photon torpedoes, vaporising them so completely that the tragedy would be prevented. It occurred to Alynna that if such a ship zipped around the system with short duration bursts of high warp speed, it would be able to put an end to the whole thing before any of the blocs had time to mount an effective response. Looking deeper in the files, she saw that the Federation diplomats were carefully concealing the true extent of their ships' capabilities from their interlocutors, who believe the Federation to consist only a dozen or so relatively nearby worlds.

She continued reading, curious that the Cardassians had not involved themselves. The area was, admittedly, only just on the edge of even their own inflated opinion of their sphere of influence, and perhaps they considered the whole thing too fractious to be worth dealing with.

But if that changed ...

Alynna sighed deeply as she realised what she was contemplating. Proxy wars were a terrible thing, Earth's history -- even that of the Federation itself -- littered with far too many of them. Artificially amplifying the threat of one had all too high a risk of making that threat come true. But this was only a potentiality -- one that, if anything, her plan was going to _reduce_ the risk of -- against the seeming certainty of defeat, in either the short term by the Cardassians, or the long term by the Borg, if the fleet went directly to Kepla.

She had to consider the bigger picture: she had been given an unparalleled opportunity to make things better, but with it came a responsibility beyond any she had shouldered even as an Admiral of the Fleet. It seemed clear that it was here that the best opportunity lay for drawing the squadron away from Kepla.

She worked quickly to bring up a schematic of the subspace communications network in the area. Starfleet's beacon stations petered out towards the border, but there was a Breen relay not far away. If she bounced her signal from that, properly disguised ...

"Computer, give me access to full spectrum communications."

"That system is restricted to communications officers and flag rank--"

"Override Kappa Kappa Seven," she said quickly. She shouldn't know that code yet, but as far as the computer was concerned now that she was a Commodore she might qualify for it.

There was another heart-stopping pause as the computer considered her request. Each time she used the systems, she was increasing the chance of it detecting the anomaly of her being in two places at once. "Authorisation code validated," it said.

Alynna stared at the interface, bewildered for a second by the complexity of it. The mind-boggling layers of interoperability code that lay behind every attempt to communicate between the various peoples of the galaxy, all using wildly different protocols, gave her new respect for the work her comms officers did every time they opened hailing frequencies.

But she would have to master the crucial elements, and fast. Switching over to the intelligence database, she found some recently decrypted Cardassian communiques. They were using a polymorphic mutliphasic cipher, but one that was easily broken by quantum computing techniques -- and more importantly, easily faked.

She composed her message, adopting a typically terse Cardassian style, and sent it via a complex routing, not using standard Starfleet frequencies, that would see it eventually arrive with the Breen relay as its apparent point of origin.

All that remained now was to delete any evidence that she had ever accessed the systems.

But before she could, the doors opened, light spilling in from the corridor.

"Display off," Alynna said. The table in front of her went dark -- enough, she hoped, to hide the details of her face from close inspection.

"I see you have no taste for the party, either." It was Edward.

"How did you find me here?" Alynna asked.

"I simply asked the computer for your location," he said.

She made a non-committal noise. It was interesting that it had provided hers, and not this time's "native" Alynna. She tried to remember where she had gone; perhaps back to the _Gryphon_? That might explain why the Starbase's systems were so unconcerned by her presence.

"Computer, reactivate starmap display."

The huge representation of the interlocking frontlines of the Cardassian and Federation positions blossomed back into existence on the table in front of them. Alynna wondered for a moment if that would provide enough light for Edward to see her properly by, but he was intent only on the display.

It was hard to remember, after nearly twenty years as comrades in arms, that her relationship with Edward had not been plain sailing at the very beginning. Conscious of having been promoted over others, he had seemed determined to prove that there was a reason for it, questioning her decisions almost constantly. It was only after the Battle of Kepla that she had gained his respect. In the most recent iteration of the timeline, it was because of her apparent masterstroke in uncovering the ambush. In the first timeline, though, she had been convinced he would criticise her openly for not having foreseen the ambush; instead, he had found her in private -- as private as anywhere was on the crowded _Rutledge_ \-- and admitted that he would never have spotted it either.

"This is a mistake," he said bluntly, looking at the deployment patterns she had been playing with before she came up with her scheme. If he had been drinking, it must have been synthehol, and he had shaken off the effects entirely. He reached out to gesture towards the Kepla sector. "We should press the attack there; that's where their fleet is stretched thinnest."

"I have my reasons," Alynna said. Even if they were concocted ones that hadn't come to fruition yet.

"With the greatest respect," he said, sounding as though he had anything but, "I know that I'm new to being a Captain, but this is your first time commanding a squadron, too. If I am to have confidence in the orders I'm giving to my crew, I need to know--"

"You need to know that the orders you're following come from your superior officer, and that she has good reasons for them, even if they're not clear to you." She softened slightly. "I appreciate any useful input. And I know that you are an excellent officer." She recovered herself, thinking quickly. "Your record, and the fact that Starfleet have given you a ship such as the _Cairo_ on your first command, both speak to that." She risked a direct look at him, but if he saw the two decades' worth of extra experience in her eyes, he thought better than to mention it. "But I am not interested in administering a democracy. If we are to win this war, then Starfleet requires discipline, above all else."

"Understood, _Commodore_ ," he said. The emphasis he put on her title could have been respect or subtle sarcasm, but she thought, on balance, that it was the former.

"Dismissed," she said, and watched with a twinge of anxiety as Edward left again.

Once he had gone, she deactivated the starmap once more, and got to work removing the evidence of what she done. Years of experience in using electronic countermeasures against the Borg -- near-futile, but sometimes just enough to keep her small band of Federation vessels alive another day -- left her easily able to manipulate the relevant database entries at low level so that they appeared never to have existed at all. Subtlety, she had told herself, was what was required to change history successfully. She had thought of it at first in terms of statesmanship. But this all felt like spycraft.

Finally finished, she took a single PADD and left the room. Would she be back there in the morning -- the other her, who she had not even met this time -- to explain to the squadron why they were diverting to Agrax? Or would her whole scheme come to nothing?

Quietly, she paced down the corridor, unsure where to go next. Having decided to try to pull strings behind the scenes, she lacked an ally in this time zone the way she had had in her past self.

Gradually, she heard noise: the hubbub of conversation, snatches of song. Calling up the Starbase's layout on a wall display, she realised that she was much closer to Recreation Hall #7 than she had realised.

She headed into a side corridor at the sight of a couple, obviously inebriated, at least temporarily infatuated, and heading for somewhere more private. She remembered that someone at the party had persuaded the officer in charge of the commissary to let them have access to some particularly interesting beverages: vintage wines, Andorian lagers, even some bright blue bottles that everyone politely pretended was made to an ancient Vulcan recipe.

Once the pair had gone round the corner, she stepped closer to the doors, though staying far enough away not to activate them. She could hear the singing more clearly now: Ben and a large proportion of the senior staff of the _Rutledge_ , predictably enough.

She heard banging on the table. Inching closer, secreting herself ineffectively behind a pot plant, she looked through the frosted plexiglass set in the door.

Edward was rising, just as he had in the vision. "To Starfleet," he said. "To duty. And discipline."

She didn't see exactly how the others reacted, though she heard them repeat the words, because at that moment her PADD beeped softly.

Looking down, she saw that her scheme had paid off exactly as she had hoped: the other factions on Agrax had intercepted her "Cardassian" message offering support to their rival, and were now demanding a Federation military presence. Her past self would have no choice but to respond, and the Battle of Kepla would be avoided entirely.

As she read the various ambassadors' commentaries on the communiques, though, the text on her PADD began to fade, the backlight glowing brighter and brighter purple. Alynna realised what it meant, tried to protest -- it was too soon, how could she be sure that she would have tipped things the right way? -- but if the Orb, or the aliens themselves, could understand her in that moment of snatching her away, they paid no heed. The Orb took her--


	4. The Minstrel Boy To The War Has Gone

**Dytallix B, Federation space, 2375**

Alynna lost her balance as she arrived back in the present, stumbling forwards onto the floor of the mining cavern.

Once she had steadied herself, she remained in a crouch, putting a hand to her throbbing temple. The transition was rougher this time, more difficult somehow.

"Admiral?" a concerned voice said. One she didn't immediately recognise. While she was still crouched down, she felt fingers at her neck, parting her hair. Was this someone she knew well?

She turned to look, and saw that she did know him. Or at least, she did _now_. The Alynna who had lived through the last eighteen years, whose memories she now shared, knew him well. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, formerly of the _Stargazer_.

And the gesture of his hand on her neck had been no great intimacy: it was the same necessary operational security as the blood samples had been in her original timeline. In this timeline, she remembered -- new memories she had never had before -- the Cardassian War had ended in a long drawn-out stalemate. But before a final peace accord could be agreed, another threat entirely had taken over the Federation: parasitic creatures from far away -- some even speculated another galaxy entirely -- had hijacked the command structure, taking over more and more Starfleet personnel. Early on, perhaps, it might have been stopped, but the newly commissioned _Enterprise_ , commanded by Edward, had been too deferential to the hierarchy when it should have challenged it. He himself had escaped, but the Federation had been lost. Starfleet had been lost.

Picard put out a hand to help her up.

"Show me _your_ neck," she said. He obliged, turning round; second nature to him, now. With what little hair he had remaining close-cropped, it was easy to see that there was no tell-tale gill emerging from his neck.

Picard turned back around. "I know that this is going to be difficult."

She only had a moment to wonder _what_ was going to be difficult.

Because walking into the entrance to the cave were two figures: people she had seen very recently, from one point of view -- or from several.

Edward, keeping a phaser rifle trained on Ben.

Ben, who had been with her, here in this cave, when it had all begun, a few subjective days previously.

Ben, who had died at Wolf 359.

Ben, who was now the host for one of the mother creatures. As far as Free Starfleet's best estimates went, there were now at least two dozen in the Alpha Quadrant, each controlling their parasitic offspring across several sectors.

Ben, who was carrying an Orb casing.

_What had gone wrong?_

Out loud, she said, "It keeps happening again. The same events, the same protagonists, just ... shuffled differently."

Picard looked at her sharply. "Happening again?"

"I'll ... explain later," she said. "If I get the chance."

Picard stayed close as she crossed over to the pair.

First, she inspected Edward's neck; just because the pattern in the other timelines had been that this encounter hadn't been a trick, there were no guarantees about this time round.

Then, she and Picard turned round to allow him to check theirs. This was second nature to her, she realised. It was hard to sort through the memories, but it seemed that _this_ Alynna had been on the run in a parasite-controlled Federation for a decade or more.

"Alynna," said the creature that wore Ben's body. Its voice sounded hoarse, scratchy. The creature had been inside him for years, and still it couldn't control his vocal folds properly.

"You don't get to call me that," she said, looking the creature in its stolen eye.

"Admiral," Edward said. "He says-- He says it really is Ben. He really is Ben."

"Not possible," Picard said sharply. "The only way--"

Alynna ignored him, addressing Edward. "And you believe him?"

"I'm pointing a phaser rifle at him," Edward said. "But I don't entirely disbelieve him. And ... he was the one who found me. And he hasn't tried anything since he did."

"It was this," the creature said, hefting the box. "It-- It's very hard to explain."

"You had a vision?" Alynna said.

"A vision?" Picard said. Edward looked just as startled.

"Inside that box is a Bajoran orb, one of the artefacts left behind by the wormhole aliens--"

"Then the rumours are true?" Picard said. Frowning as she accessed her multiple memories, she realised that in this timeline the discovery of the wormhole was not definitively known to Free Starfleet. "A stable wormhole ..."

"A stable wormhole occupied by aliens with tremendous powers, including ... I don't pretend to understand all of it, but I don't think they perceive time the same way that we do. And somehow what's in that box is linked to it. You may find this difficult to believe, but I have been ... travelling," Alynna said. "In time."

"You're saying that the box the Maxwell creature is carrying contains some sort of time machine?"

"It's a little stranger than that," Alynna said. "But in essence, yes. I have been--"

"Alynna!" the creature said again.

"If you really are Ben, tell me what we did on Risa," Alynna said. That had still happened in this timeline, at the end of yet another, different Cardassian War.

Edward shook his head sadly. "That sort of thing doesn't work any more. Hasn't for years, not since they got full control over all the databases--"

"Not everything makes it into the official record," Alynna said. "Tell me what we did, our _second night_ on Risa."

"In front of Edward?" the creature said, cracking a smile. "And whoever this guy is?"

"Whisper in my ear, then."

She felt Picard's hand on her arm as she leaned in close, but shrugged him off.

Ben gave her the right answer.

"It's him," she said, stepping back.

"A better world is possible," Ben said urgently.

"That's what everyone keeps saying," Alynna said. She looked at Edward. "I've been ... transferred, I suppose is the best way to put it, into the past on two separate occasions now. Both times, starting from here. Both times, you were here. Both times, someone who was an implacable enemy of what remained of the Federation brought me the orb, and told me that: _a better world is possible_."

" _Plus ç change, plus c'est le même chose,_ " Picard said quietly.

Edward frowned. "So what are you saying, that we're like a deck of cards, being shuffled in a different order?"

"Something like that," she agreed.

"And you think if you get the order right ..."

"I don't know," Alynna said. "But I think I have to keep trying."

"Alynna," came Ben's voice, and it was cracking.

"I don't think we have much time before the parasite regains control," Edward said. "Whatever it is you're going to do--"

"Alynna ..." She looked into his eyes, and for a moment, she could really see _Ben_ there. "A better world is possible."

There was a moment of confusion: the light started to die in Ben's eyes; it looked as though the parasite was about to force him to drop the Orb container; Edward hoisted the phaser rifle; Picard, realising that after this one moment nothing else might matter, pulled hard on the doors; purple light flooded Alynna's vision--

 _Her mother, in their apartment, fussing with her recipes again. "You have to add_ just _the right amount of each ingredient," she was saying._

_Ben, on Risa. A raised eyebrow. "It's a matter of exquisite precision."_

_She was standing in the cave again. Ro Laren and Odo were in front of her. So were Janeway and the Borg drone. So were Edward and the parasite-infested Ben._

_All the timelines were overlaid on top of each other._

_"It's all happening at the same time," Alynna said._

_"Yes," came the reply, from all of them at once, as though this was a statement of the obvious. And then, suddenly--_

_The white void again. A Starfleet officer she thought she recognised. Had she met him as a cocky, overconfident cadet? What was his name, Sisko? "I_ am _the Emissary," he said. And yet, underlying them, that hint of harshness that always came when the parasite-controlled spoke to you--_

_She got the confirmation she didn't want when he turned his back on her, and she saw the gill protruding from his neck._

_So the parasites had not just discovered the wormhole, they had made one of their own the aliens' "Emissary". For a moment, she imagined the conflict between the Federation under their control and the Dominion. That might just be a conflagration to consume the entire galaxy, to dwarf anything she had lived through, in any timeline. The parasites and the Founders were not so different, both working by controlling entire societies from behind the scenes. They would willingly throw billions into harm's way to settle their dispute. Even the Borg at their worst valued each drone as a part of the greater collective._

_"A better world is possible," Sisko said, still facing away from her._

_She was back in the cave. And on Risa. And in her apartment. It was too much to take in._

_"A better world is possible." What was once an assertion of fact had become an urgent exhortation to action._

_She turned to Ben. Ben as he had been, in another timeline entirely, not the monstrosity he had become. Stared straight at him to shut out the confusing cacophony around._

_"A better world is possible," he said again._

_"I don't know if I'm strong enough."_

_Ben smiled, sadly. "If you aren't, who is?"_

* * *

**USS Rutledge, 2357**

Alynna woke groggily, to the regular soft bleeping of medical machinery.

She must have collapsed on her return to the past. And now she was here, in a sickbay. Where had the aliens sent her this time?

She got her answer when Ben walked in. The younger Ben, wearing his uniform with a captain's insignia.

He conferred with the doctor for a moment and then crossed to her biobed. "I seem to remember," he said gently, "that you always swore never to get involved in time travel."

"You've figured it out, then?"

"There were only a few options," Ben said. "Your appearance meant that you were either a particularly unconvincing surgically-altered Cardassian agent, or a future Commodore Nechayev."

"Admiral, actually. And good to know that I'm unconvincing as myself."

He smiled. "And since Dr. Romero's DNA results didn't show any non-human genetics, but _did_ show your telomeres were considerably shorter--"

"OK, OK, I get it." She turned serious. "How many people know?"

"As few as possible. I beamed you straight here myself, and we're away from the main area of sickbay. I trust Romero with my life, and _she_ trusts the nurses who've been keeping an eye on you."

Alynna nodded, satisfied, for now at least. Then a thought struck her. "Wait, you 'beamed me straight here'. Where did I ... appear?" She smiled weakly. "We really don't have the language for this stuff, do we?"

"I'm sure there's a technical term," Ben said. "But if you'd wanted to learn it you'd have paid attention at the Academy. And same goes for me. I'm just a captain, I go where they send me and do what they tell me."

"I'm starting to feel the same way," she said.

"So, level with me," he said. "What's about to happen that makes Stardate 33481 the right time to come back to?"

She frowned. "When?"

"Stardate 33481," Ben said. Further back than either of the previous two attempts. Another chance. "The year is 2357--"

"Yes, yes, but that means ... you're still a week out from Starbase 375?"

"We're on our way there at Warp Five, as per our orders, to join the rest of the squadron."

She tried to remember whether anything had happened to the _Rutledge_ en route, but drew a blank.

"You still didn't tell me where I arrived," Alynna said.

"Ah, that's easy. You appeared in my quarters."

The doctor came in. "Sir, her vitals are spiking, I think she needs more rest."

"You can tell me about our future later," Ben said.

Dr. Romero put a hypospray to her neck, and Alynna slept again.

* * *

She woke to the sound of voices.

"Look at these neural mappings," Romero was saying. Alynna opened her eyes just enough to see that she was pointing things out to Ben on a large wall display.

"Talk to me as though I never went to medical school," Ben said. "Because I didn't."

"Memories are encoded in connections between neurons, entire networks of them, mostly in the cerebral cortex. But many of our patient's neurons seem to be trapped in a long-term quantum superposition."

"And _that_ should not be possible," another voice observed mildly. A voice she hadn't heard before, or at least not for a long time. T'Pran, the _Rutledge_ 's Science Officer, and Vaunar's bond mate. "At the level of even a single neuron, the decoherence time frame is measured in attoseconds."

"She has memories from other timelines," Ben said.

"That is our working hypothesis," T'Pran said. "Somehow those memories manifest themselves in this way. But it is not sustainable."

Romero took up the explanation. "Whatever process is sustaining the superposition is not just keeping it stable. The effect is spreading."

"What does that mean?"

There was a moment of silence that Alynna took as Romero indicating something on the display. "Her other neurons will go into the same sort of quantum state. But that will gradually affect her ability to do ... well, anything."

She gasped, and they realised she was awake.

They crossed over to her. Romero said, "I'm sorry, we shouldn't have been discussing--"

"It's better that I know," Alynna said. "I think I knew already, in a way. When they--" The concerned looks on their faces were joined by curiosity; even T'Pran's Vulcan equanimity couldn't disguise it entirely. "I would like to talk to Captain Maxwell alone," she said.

Romero and T'Pran nodded at one another and left the room.

"So, I'm losing my mind."

He picked up her hand, and seemed to have surprised himself by doing so. She smiled at him. "So, in the future ..."

"Which one?" she said reflexively.

"The good one, the one that you're here to make."

"It's the last roll of the dice, Ben," she said. "And here I am, hidden away in a sickbay side room."

"Then perhaps that's where you're meant to be, perhaps this is where 'they' sent you. But who are 'they'?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Alynna said.

"I would," he said quietly.

"Then perhaps it's just that I _shouldn't_. Too much knowledge of the future could be a bad thing--"

"Now you sound like you _were_ paying attention at the Academy." He looked at her seriously. "Is it about the war?"

"It is, and it isn't," Alynna said. She shifted in the bed, trying to lever herself a little more upright. "Put it this way, it's never _just_ about the Cardassians. There are others out there we-- you know nothing about yet."

"But if you gave us the information--"

Alynna shook her head. "I tried that. The direct intervention. Too drastic. Made things even worse. And then I tried ... nudging things. And it seemed to work. But a nudge I didn't even know I was making doomed us all, in a different way."

Romero returned. "Sir," she said, a warning note in her voice that Alynna didn't like at all.

"I know, I know," Ben said.

"What's going to happen?" Alynna asked. It was only when the words were out of her mouth that she realised the irony.

"We're working on something," Romero said. "But for now, you need to rest."

* * *

When she awoke, she found out what "something" was: a hefty transporter coil placed at the head of her biobed, only inches from her skull. Romero explained that it had been T'Pran's idea; by switching on the Heisenberg compensators, and only the Heisenberg compensators, the effect spreading through her brain was at least stopped temporarily.

It gave Alynna the most dreadful headache whenever it was turned on, and she felt as though it was jumbling her memories. She felt as though her brain was trying to force the three mutually contradictory histories she had lived through into one, at the cost of it being utterly incoherent. Picard had been her right-hand-man when she'd served in the Maquis, and they'd encountered the Borg ...

Dr. Romero could give her something for the pain, at least. But the confusion was nearly as bad.

Ben came back to visit her; he didn't press her for any further information, just talked. And she realised that there was at least one constant among the timelines: their week on Risa at the end of the war. Things had never progressed between them beyond that, in any version of history, but she held the memories dear, and for more than just their consistency.

A day or two later, T'Pran had devised a way to manufacture smaller scale compensators that she could wear. The overall effect was a strange technological tiara.

She still couldn't walk around the ship, for fear of being seen by the rest of the crew, but at least she could get out of bed.

And she could visit the captain's quarters, discreetly. Ben insisted on having her for dinner.

Comfort and luxury had been far down the list of design priorities for ships like the _Rutledge_ ; in peacetime, the vast majority of its interior volume was given over to onboard laboratories. In war, it carried large numbers of troops and supplies, while remaining more than capable of playing a full part in a deep space engagement. A versatile ship indeed.

Still, Ben had done his best to make his spartan quarters hospitable, replicating a tablecloth and even a candelabra, which he had filled with real candles. The flames flickered, the main lighting set to a low level.

"Captain Maxwell," she said as she sat down. "This really is quite something."

"Wait 'til you taste the food," he said with a grin.

He was right: it was exquisite.

Afterwards, he opened a bottle of Saurian brandy. At Alynna's raised eyebrows, he said, "I checked with Dr. Romero. It won't interact with your medications or your--" he waved at the compensator headband.

"Well, in that case, just a small one," Alynna said.

"I know you can't tell me about the future," Ben said. "And not just for all the boring reasons Starfleet would want you to parrot out. But because you want to make a new one."

Alynna nodded.

"But tell me what you can?"

Alynna felt behind her for the switch on her headgear.

"Alynna--" Ben said.

"It's all right," she said. "I have to _know_. There are many things I shouldn't tell you, but ..." She closed her eyes, as the memories started to make sense again. "You're right that there are some things that I should."

"Take as much time as you need."

"We need peace with honour, Ben," she said. "It might take years, but--"

"The Cardassians don't have honour," he said. "Not as far as I can tell."

The memory of Setlik III was still raw for him, of course.

" _We_ do," Alynna said. "We need to stay Starfleet. Stay _Federation_. That's vital. But it doesn't mean blind trust, either. When the peace comes -- and it will -- _watch them_ , Ben."

"Watch them?"

"The Cuellar System," Alynna said. The headache was returning now, or perhaps it was an entirely different sort of one. "Minos Korva. _Bajor_."

"All in Cardassian space," Ben said.

"And all significant. I don't know what will happen, no one does, but--" She flinched slightly, a stab of pain in her temples. " _Watch them._ "

Ben got up and went over to her, intent on switching the compensators back on. She waved him away.

"No," she said. "Not yet. We need to talk about what happens next. I have to leave when we reach the Starbase."

Ben looked confused. "You told me that you got ... snatched away, I suppose."

"I have no idea when it will happen. I don't even know if it will happen." And, she thought to herself, she had more still to do. With full access to her memories, she felt that her strategy before had been the correct one: keep the squadron away from Kepla until the Cardassians had to retreat. She just had to implement it without accidentally running across anyone's path. But that would be easy enough, with more time to play with.

"And where will you go, if 'they' don't take you back?"

"I don't know," Alynna said truthfully. "But ... I need to stay out of the way of events as they unfold." She winced as her headache intensified, and finally gave in to the urge to switch the compensators back on.

"Are you all right?" Ben asked.

"I will be," Alynna said. She looked at him, and it felt almost as though she was seeing him for the first time, as the memories re-sorted themselves in her mind once more. "Give me some more of that Saurian brandy."

Ben poured her another, larger measure.

"There are some things I can still tell you about the future," she said. "Because they happened the same each time."


	5. Epilogue

**Feiria Prime, 2381**

"Excuse me," Beverly said. "Do you know this woman?"

All she received was a shake of the head.

Jean-Luc was on the other side of the piazza, showing his PADD to the locals, just as she was, and seemed to be having just as little luck.

"I was so _sure_ ," she said when they met up again at the replimat.

"Well, it's been a nice enough holiday," Jean-Luc said, handing her a raktajino. "A small colony world in an out of the way part of the Beta Quadrant is as nice a place to spend a week's leave as any. And we can keep looking, if that's what you want to do--"

"May I join you?" They looked up, and saw a hooded figure. "After all, I'm told you were looking for me." She pulled the hood down, and revealed features that were really very close to the picture Beverly had put together with some simple simulated ageing software. What she hadn't anticipated in her picture was the glittering band around her forehead; it looked like more than ornamentation, but Beverly couldn't immediately discern its purpose.

"But--" Jean-Luc began.

"They told you they didn't know me?" Nechayev sat down. "That's because they're my friends, and they look after me."

"Not so old as all that, I think," Jean-Luc said.

"It depends how you're counting," Nechayev said. "I have enough memories to be well over one hundred years old, from a certain point of view." She clapped her hands on her knees. "So, how did you find me? I really did think it would be Temporal Investigations."

"Beverly was the one who did all the detective work," Jean-Luc said.

"But it was Jean-Luc who had the initial hunch," Beverly pointed out. "Then again, he has his own experiences with this sort of thing."

"Certain things just didn't add up," Jean-Luc said. "The one that nagged at me the most was Ben Maxwell. For years afterwards, I couldn't work it out: why would such a highly decorated Starfleet captain throw away his entire career like that?"

"Yes," Nechayev said. "I felt ... regret over that." She stirred her drink slowly. "I do keep up with the news here, even as I try to stay away from making it. For instance, I know that you and I -- the other me -- don't really get along in this timeline."

Jean-Luc coughed, and Beverly suppressed a smile at his obvious discomfort. "I think we have come to an ... accommodation, in recent years."

"That's good to know," she said. " _I_ remember a time when you were my right hand man." Beverly couldn't stop herself smiling at the way his eyes went wide at that.

"So tell us," Beverly said, "what did happen?"

"Just a moment," Nechayev said. She tapped the side of the circlet on her head, just for a moment.

And then she told them, all of it: all the terrible timelines she had escaped, the Prophets and the mission they had sent her on, her failed attempts.

"But then ... you were successful?" Beverly prompted, when she tailed off.

"That's the worst of it," Nechayev said. "I never knew. Never knew if they didn't bring me back because I was finished, or because I still had more to do. 'A better world is possible,' that's all they told me. Perhaps they just knew that I wouldn't survive another trip. And I still don't know, not for certain, whether this is the better world or not. When the Cardassians pulled out of Bajor, when Sisko, the real Sisko"--a curious phrasing, but Beverly didn't interrupt--"became the Emissary, I thought perhaps it was. But then came the Dominion War, and it all seemed to be happening again."

"And now?" Jean-Luc said.

"You've been out there in the galaxy, you tell me."

"The Federation thrives," he said. "There are challenges, threats even, but none of them are existential."

"Then perhaps I have succeeded after all," Nechayev said.

Beverly smiled. "You know, Ben Maxwell will be released soon," she said.

"Will he, indeed?"

"He knows you exist," Beverly said. "And he's kept your secret all these long years."

"Do you think he will come looking for me?"

"I think," Jean-Luc said, "that rather depends on whether you want us to tell him to do so."

She smiled. "I think ... I think perhaps you should."


End file.
